spin(dle)

Everything is spinning these days. Living in a college town means feeling its pulse quicken at the end-of-semester, exam stress and excitement of summer plans reach through all of us and quicken our own, regardless of our associations with the school.

Taking a tiny break this week from watching the wheel spin to notice the caterpillars on my snapdragon flower arrangement consuming only the blossoms, decided to raise them up to see what kind of butterfly they'd be, feeding their voracious jaws more snapdragons from my garden hoping they'd spin too. Instead most of them disappeared, save one, who mysteriously declined to make a cocoon and burrowed into some cheesecloth near the flower vase, laid there for a few days bloating until I looked again and it had cast off it's soft green skin in exchange for a hard brown one. When touched, its tail wiggles an ineffectual protest. Looked up this mysterious behavior of digging and it seems it may becoming a moth. Apparently butterflies tend to make cocoons while few moths like to burrow.
Hopefully handling it this way won't kill it. Strange isn't it? The deep black eye stares, and while that delicate strand of antennae and wing veins emboss the shell. Fully self-contained and carefully packed, its wings grow, pleating and folding, perfectly aligned parcels. When it exchanges this skin for the next, it will pump nearly all of the body's blood into the wing's hollow capillaries stretching them out until dry, when it will pull its blood back into the body and swim in the air. Until then it lays buried, sleeping, changing; meditating on what it will become as it's cells respond.

Thoughts dwelling on my little moth drawing I made after my mom died- moth(er).

Finally started spinning the wool washed and carded in November. The staple of the wool is short, maybe 2 inches and my tendency is to spin it thin, not yarn but thread really, its thickness wavers a bit like some of the powerlines I watch so carefully, both undulating heartbeats whispering stories about the creation of civilization as we know it. This beginnning from the most raw material building toward the destination, even when unknown, suits me, I love knowing and controlling every step. My tiny garden now includes cotton and flax seedlings to explore this more. The cotton seeds are from cotton bolls I picked in Georgia in November, the flax are from my local grocery store. They were planted on a whim, so a bit late on the cotton and maybe the wrong season for flax.
cotton seedlings 3 1/2 weeks old
flax 3 1/2 weeks old
white acre peas 4 days old (not destined to be fiber, just food)